BB Video - Pirate Bay Surrenders to Hollywood: Peter Sunde interview

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Founders of The Pirate Bay have made a deal to sell off "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" to a Swedish gaming company for about $7.8 million.

More than 20 million visitors use the site each month. This April, TPB's three founders and a representative of their ISP were sentenced to a year in prison and damages of about $4 million over allegations of copyright violation.

A week before the news was announced, I interviewed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde at the Open Video Conference in New York City, about that lawsuit, and about their plans for the future. He mentioned that "huge, huge news" was coming up, but refused to disclose the news at that time. An edited version of our conversation above, including Peter's explanation of why he believes filesharing and anonymity are good for democracy, is above.

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I’m interested in seeing where the site is going after this purchase. According to that LA Times article, GGF will pay users to let their computer become part of a large peer-to-peer network, then they can use the money to purchase content on the site. This seems like a really good idea, in my opinion, and seems to be the best way to go from here. I suppose now it just depends on what companies will allow their content to be sold on the site, for what price, and how much users will be paid to be part of this network.

Commenting more on the LA Times post than the video: I find the concept that KaffN8ed (comment #5 here) pointed out interesting, but I somehow don’t think that it will work (in the sense of actually influencing the behavior of the larger community – I’m willing to believe that it will “work” in the same way Napster does: Alive, but effectively out of the game). It might, but I’d be somewhat surprised.

And if it does, I somehow fear that the licensing jungle will lead to problems along the line of “The content you requested cannot be viewed from your country due to licensing issues.” (It’s currently mild on YouTube, but sites like Hulu and Playlist.com are pretty much dead space for me.)

I just want to make sure everyone understands that though the headline and the copy above implies there is a relationship between the sale of The Pirate Bay and the fines that the three guys on trial now owe, the two are not connected.

Peter Sunde relates in this podcast how in 2006 they gave the company away and establish contractual requirements that any sale of the company would only generate proceeds that would go into a foundation to be used for privacy/free speech/file sharing ventures. It’s legally impossible for the fines applied to the three guys to come out of the money from this sale :

Xeni, you’re right, I re-read and realized I must’ve made the connection accidentally. The opening two paragraphs that first state how much the sale was for and then how much they were fined made me assume that they’d be paying the fines with the proceeds of the sale :

“Founders of The Pirate Bay have made a deal to sell …. for about $7.8 million. ”

“This April, TPB’s three founders … were sentenced to a year in prison and damages of about $4 million …”

Later today I happened on the podcast and was really inspired by the actions they took to prevent any suit against them from being able to harm the project itself.

Anyhow, sorry for blaming you for my mis-read, just wanted to make sure everyone knew these guys weren’t selling out to save their hides.

Based on some of the other reporting I’ve seen about this, it may be they are trying to create the ultimate ‘chinese wall’, separating seeders from leechers entirely. Is part of their intent to protect the seeders? Unknown, but exremely interesting if true.

The far more likely scenario is a naive CEO who doesn’t know what he’s getting into. He has a lot of money, apparently, but also his main related experience is running Internet cafes? Uh-oh.

They have sold the domain but they plan to keep providing tracking of torrents. Please don’t believe what the media-industry wants you to believe:http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-closes-its-tracker-removes-torrents-090630/
“Alongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.”

Hands up anyone who thinks that TPB will keep even a fraction of their user base now that they’ve “sold out”. It’s Heisenberg’s business deal – the site is highly trafficked and well worth buying, right up until the moment you buy it.

Kids, they took it as far as they could. They gave up years of their lives. But the US bought laws in Sweden through judicial “advisory” groups that courted judges for years whilst we were downloading. They can’t continue; the bias the judge obviously had was ruled proper by yet another judge who was “educated” by IP owners on metalaw beyond mere mortal laws. They have no chance.

The internet is just pipes and switches located on Earth, and they will bow down to the USA’s ideas of imaginary property rights. The world could have stopped them, but it had other things to do, and the IP lords had all the time and money and motivation. They pounded IP into everyone’s mental vocab and now it is rotting there, poisoning all that could have been.

If you think they sold out, you are welcome to start your own Pirate Bay 2. Good luck with that.

If they continue as they are, the doors will be kicked down.
They will be dragged to jail.
If they attempt to escape jail, they will be beaten down.
If they escape jail, they will be chased.
If they refuse to surrender, they will be blasted with a Faraday cannon, or deafened with a sonic cannon, or tranked, or stunned with Tasers, or beaten with sticks until they stop moving.

Or shot dead. Ultimately, the price of refusal to surrender is death. You prepared to die?

There’s way too many semi-translated Swedish news articles running around and conflicting statements from GGF and current/former members of Pirate Bay to really tell what’s actually going on with this sale — but the high likelihood is that this is the end of Pirate Bay.

GGF is a sketchy outfit — and already accusations of insider trading and “pump and dump” are making the rounds — but any attempt they make to monetize Pirate Bay will result in a resounding, epic fail. Just try to imagine what the reaction will be from any Pirate Bay user when asked to install a proprietary piece of software on their computer to become a member of a private, walled network that can track their usage and implement some form of DRM. Because that’s exactly what most Pirate Bay users have been looking for.

(quote)
wow, just like the original mp3.com…
“we will fight Hollywood tooth and nail!”
“oh, never mind, we are going to sell out to Hollywood”.
They built it and it is their freedom at risk, but it really makes me feel like a tool for supporting them in their struggle we they sell out.
I would much rather have TPB shut down and walk away.
everyone has their price apparently
(/quote)

that’s so stupid. of course they’re gonna sell it, what else?? if they can make awesome lots of money on it they’d better grab their chance and as so, they can launch new products again et cetera. although i don’t like the idea of the servers and the site now being in hollywood’s hands.. you must understand that they take this step (and not the one of throwing it all away)

Seems like lots of people out in not-rich-world rely on PB for non-infected cracks they can use to work and study. Perhaps with PB going away, we should expect another surge in world malware bot population.